25 Art Exhibitions to View in N.Y.C. This Weekend

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The Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair, which takes place at the Brooklyn Expo Center on Saturday and Sunday, will host a preview of the Morgan Library & Museum’s upcoming exhibition on “Frankenstein,” which was written by Mary Shelley (above) 200 years ago.CreditCreditvia National Portrait Gallery, London

Sept. 6, 2018

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

‘HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask-face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross-cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876-1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum’s own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi’s little-known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost-living things into the world and convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik)212-708-9400, moma.org

BROOKLYN ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR at the Brooklyn Expo Center (Sept. 8-9).The rare books industry was jolted last month when two men were accused of stealing over $8 million worth of books and artifacts and selling them at book fairs. That subtext might only add to the intrigue of this fair, which will turn a spotlight on a different menace: Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley’s ghastly creation turns 200 this year and will be celebrated with a preview of the Morgan Library & Museum’s upcoming exhibition in honor of the anniversary; a first edition of Ms. Shelley’s 1818 novel could be yours if you have $250,000 lying around. Yet Frankenstein is only a small part of the fair, which will house 50,000 rare and antique items, ranging from underground Swedish art to images from early photo booths to World War II postcards. (Andrew Chow)781-862-4039, brooklynbookfair.com

‘CANOVA’S GEORGE WASHINGTON’ at the Frick Collection (through Sept. 23). When Canova’s statue arrived in Raleigh, N.C., in 1821, the American press went wild for the likeness by the Italian neoclassical sculptor of the first president, wearing Roman military dress and drafting his farewell address. Ten years later it was destroyed by fire, but the Frick has brought the full-scale plaster model of the lost statue over from Italy for this smashing show that reveals how European artists were inspired by American revolutionary ideals. Canova’s Washington, looming all alone over the Frick’s circular gallery, wears thickly curled hair instead of the pulled-back style he sports on the dollar bill, and in both his costume (leather skirt, strappy sandals) and his bearing, he embodies the ideals of the new republic, where principles come before power. Supplementary materials include a life mask of Washington and several smaller Canova models, including a nude Washington with some rather nice pecs. (Jason Farago)212-288-0700, frick.org

‘CHARTING THE DIVINE PLAN: THE ART OF ORRA WHITE HITCHCOCK’ at the American Folk Art Museum (through Oct. 14). Love in the time of science — that could serve as the catchphrase for this ravishing exhibition of botanical and geological illustration from the first decades of the United States. Born in progressive Amherst, Mass., a few years after the Revolution, Orra White received a first-rate scientific education like few girls of her day; then, with her beloved husband, Edward Hitchcock, she painted the plants, reeds, flowers and mushrooms of New England in exquisite folios. Later, Edward became president of Amherst College, and Orra painted and drew large-scale illustrations for his lessons: Paleolithic skeletons, brightly striped cross sections of volcanic earth, a massive octopus munching on a three-masted schooner. While the plant and mushroom paintings are delicate and painstakingly exact, the classroom aids are boldly imaginative — but both are evidence of an extraordinary life in which carnal love and religious conviction intertwined with scientific discovery. (Farago)212-595-9533, folkartmuseum.org

‘MARY CORSE’ at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and ‘MARY CORSE: A SURVEY IN LIGHT’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Nov. 25). Light, and specifically the radiant light of Los Angeles, shaped Ms. Corse’s career. She became interested not just in representing light, but also in making objects that emitted or reflected it. This duo of shows features her light boxes — or “light paintings” — made with argon gas and Tesla coils, as well as her paintings on canvas that include glass microspheres, like those used in the lines that divide highway lanes. Both shows are overdue representations for Ms. Corse, who was an early member of the loosely defined Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s in California. (Schwendener)212-570-3600, whitney.org

‘CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met’s galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repoussé plaques and topped by five-pronged antennas — the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it’s the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Holland Cotter)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year’s stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo’s irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three-part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the past century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic — spotlights, choir music — which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranach’s Adam and Eve. (Farago)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION’ at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America’s great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother’s old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago)718-784-0077, movingimage.us

‘HISTORY REFUSED TO DIE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION GIFT’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 23). This inspired foundation is dispersing around 1,200 works by black self-taught artists from the American South to museums across the country. The Met’s exhibition of 29 of the 57 pieces it received proposes an exciting broadening of postwar art. It is dominated by the dialogue between the rough-hewed relief paintings of Thornton Dial and the geometrically, chromatically brilliant quilts of the Gee’s Bend collective. But much else chimes in, including works by Purvis Young, Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley. (Roberta Smith)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU: CARNE Y ARENA’ at 1611 Benning Road NE, Washington (through Oct. 31, 9 a.m.-9 p.m.). Perhaps the most technically accomplished endeavor yet in virtual reality — but closer in form to immersive live theater, created by a two-time Oscar winner — has arrived at a former church in Washington after outings in Cannes, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City. In “Carne y Arena” (“Flesh and Sand”), you explore the exhibition on your own with a motion-sensitive headset that transports you to Mexico’s border with the United States; brutal encounters with border guards interweave with surreal dream sequences, which you can perceive in three dimensions. The characters are computer renderings of the bodies of actual migrants; the landscapes are photographed by Mr. Iñárritu’s brilliant longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. It remains too early to say whether virtual reality will reshape art institutions, but this is a rare achievement, and not only for its political urgency. Tickets will be released only on the website at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on the 1st and 15th of each month of the exhibition’s duration. (Farago)carneyarenadc.com

‘BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities — works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Mr. Kingelez (1948-2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Smith)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘THE LONG RUN’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person’s game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘OBSESSION: NUDES BY KLIMT, SCHIELE AND PICASSO’ at the Met Breuer (through Oct. 7). The highlight of this uneven but jewel-studded show of erotically charged nudes from the bequest of an eccentric woolen goods heir is Egon Schiele’s incandescent “Seated Woman in Chemise.” The 1914 drawing shows a nearly naked model seated on the floor holding apart her folded legs with her hands. From the top of her egg-shaped, doll-like head, so idealized it’s practically inhuman, to the blunt exposure of her sex, rendered as simply and honestly as the medium allows, she’s an unresolvable contest of fantasy and reality. (Will Heinrich)212-731-1675,metmuseum.org

‘GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: VISIONS OF HAWAI‘I’ at the New York Botanical Garden (through Oct. 28). Finding out O’Keeffe had a Hawaiian period is kind of like finding out Brian Wilson had a desert period. But here it is: 17 eye-popping paradisal paintings, produced in a nine-week visit in 1939. The paintings, and their almost psychedelic palette, are as fleshlike and physical as O’Keeffe’s New Mexican work is stripped and metaphysical. The other star of the show, fittingly, is Hawaii, and the garden has mounted a living display of the subjects depicted in the artwork. As much as they might look like the products of an artist’s imagination, the plants and flowers in the Enid Haupt Conservatory are boastfully real. On Aloha Nights (the last one is on Saturday), the garden is staging a cultural complement of activities, including lei making, hula lessons and ukulele performances. (William L. Hamilton)718-817-8700, nybg.org

‘SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION’ at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third-floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike — Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century-spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago)212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org

‘THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION’ at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There’s a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more “ocularcentric,” we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses — and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus “The Senses” features multisensory adventures such as a portable-speaker-size contraption that emits odors, with titles like “Surfside” and “Einstein,” in timed combinations; hand-painted scratch-and-sniff wallpaper (think Warhol’s patterned cows but with cherries — cherry-scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur-lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman)212-849-8400, cooperhewitt.org

‘WAYNE THIEBAUD: DRAFTSMAN’ at the Morgan Library & Museum (through Sept. 23). Mr. Thiebaud has won a place in American art history for his densely slathered paintings of cakes, pies, ice cream cones, burgers, fruits and crudités. His drawings have been less celebrated, and this sweet show at the Morgan is the first devoted to his work in pen, charcoal and pastel. Mr. Thiebaud trained in commercial art and came to New York to work as a cartoonist. You can see the influence in his still lifes from the 1960s: The watercolor “Nine Jelly Apples” (1964) depicts the candied fruits to advantage from a high angle, while the pencil drawing “Ice Cream Cone” (1964) places the titular treat front and center, its edges as carefully teased as a model’s coiffure. Mr. Thiebaud is sometimes called a realist, but that’s not precise; his drawings (and paintings, too) rely less on artful imitation of appearances and affects than on a translation of low advertising into high art. (Farago)212-685-0008, themorgan.org

‘THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS’ at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 28). This exhibition of the great director’s photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor’s appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise-en-scène could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow)212-534-1672, mcny.org

‘TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948-1980’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant-garde government buildings, pie-in-the-sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito’s Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither-nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the “social standard.” From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome-topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War-vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this show is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘DAVID WOJNAROWICZ: HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Sept. 30). This artist was there when we needed him politically 30-plus years ago. Now we need him again, and he’s back in this big, rich retrospective. Wojnarowicz (pronounced Voyna-ROH-vich), who died at 37 in 1992, was one of the most articulate art world voices raised against the corporate greed and government foot-dragging that contributed to the early AIDS crisis. But he was far from a one-issue artist. From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual preference, as his native turf. And from it he attacked all forms of exclusion through writing, performing and object making. In the show, we find him working at full force in all three disciplines, and the timing couldn’t be better. Not long before his AIDS-related death, during the culture wars era, he wrote, “I’m convinced I’m from another planet.” In 2018 America, he would have felt more than ever like a criminal migrant, an alien combatant. (Cotter)212-570-3600, whitney.org

Last Chance

‘SUE COE: GRAPHIC RESISTANCE’ at MoMA PS 1 (through Sept. 9). In the East Village in the early 1980s, this British-American artist showed some of the strongest political art of the day, and in the most traditional of media: figurative painting, drawing and printmaking. But her kind of directness has had a hard time in a market-driven world that favors the convenient slipperiness of ambiguity. As a result, Ms. Coe was left out of many of the big “political” shows of the 1980s and ’90s, and has had spotty visibility since. Some the artist’s great early pieces are in this long overdue survey, including the 1983 mural-size collage painting titled “Woman Walks Into Bar — Is Raped by Four Men on the Pool Table — While 20 Watch.” The show also features later pictures like “Road to White House” (1992) and selections from her recent sketchbooks. Together they indicate that her style has changed over the years, growing at once more abstract and more naturalistic, but her view of the ethical mission of art has not. (Cotter)718-784-2084, momaps1.org

‘GIACOMETTI’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Sept. 12). This museum-filling outing for the signal sculptor of Western modernism is rather cautious — but revisionism can wait another day when the art looks as good as it does here. The Swiss artist’s witty and erotic early sculpture, such as the still-shocking “Disagreeable Object” (a phallic torture device with a spiked business end), enraptured the Surrealists in early 1930s Paris, but Giacometti was never content with an art of ideas, and in his filthy studio, he soon started making elongated, emaciated humanoids that have since become emblems of Europe’s postwar trauma. If you know Giacometti best for the bronzes that now go for obscene sums at auction, it’s a particular pleasure to see his work in plaster, a medium he adored; the humility of the handwork testifies to his anxious mastery. (Farago)212-423-3800, guggenheim.org

‘THE MAGIC OF HANDWRITING’ at the Morgan Library & Museum (through Sept. 16). With polemicists lamenting that cursive is going the way of the dodo and old-school devotees of pen and paper posting their work on social media with hashtags like #snailmail and #penpal, this exhibition at the Morgan might seem at first glance to be part of this nostalgia. Instead, it simply luxuriates in the humble, intimate and sometimes very messy traces that some of the great figures of history have left behind. The show features some 140 items — including a papal bull from Pope Anastasius IV and a photograph signed by Rasputin — from the encyclopedic holdings of the Brazilian collector Pedro Corrêa do Lago, who owns thousands of letters, notes, receipts, manuscripts, signed photographs and other pieces documenting notable lives in the arts, politics, science and other fields. (Jennifer Schuessler)212-685-0008, themorgan.org

‘CHAIM SOUTINE: FLESH’ at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 16). The Russian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), who spent most of his life in Paris, is best known for bloody, ecstatic paintings of beef carcasses. But it wasn’t death that interested him — it was the immaterial life force of the material world. Along with an instructive lineup of naked fowl, silver herring and popeyed sardines, this indispensable tribute to the transcendent but still undervalued painter centers on a stupendous 1925 “Carcass of Beef,” glistening scarlet, streaked with orange fat and straddling a starry sky. (Heinrich)212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org